Lopez: Patterson beamed up to podium

With gold in the balance, newest U.S. sensation delivers

Published 5:30 am, Friday, August 20, 2004

ATHENS, Greece — She came bounding off the competition podium wearing that precious, indelible look that has all the degree of difficulty of a little girl's smile.

That look that lasts forever.

She leaped into her coach's arms and a billion living rooms. Her name could have been Nadia, Shannon, Kerri or Mary Lou as much as it was Carly Patterson, someone you hardly knew before Thursday night, but will never forget.

She gave us the sweetest of Olympic moments — unrehearsed. And unreal.

This was Patterson, beaming, 20 minutes before any of us knew for sure what was to come. Before she stuck a landing in our hearts with a floor routine that made the individual all-around Olympic gold medal officially hers, she knew.

At that moment, on the third rotation of a four-rotation performance that turned the gymnastics world on its axis, she knew, her coaches knew and most of the 24 young women competing against her for immortality knew.

"That was it," legendary coach Bela Karolyi said. "Her gold medal was in her pocket before the floor routine. It was the beam."

It was Patterson, beaming. And appropriately enough, it was Patterson tipping the crown from the queen's head.

If the next Mary Lou Retton was going to come, it had to come to be this way. This was the only way. The next great one had to face the last great one and beat her.

The self-appointed queen of gymnastics, Russia's Svetlana Khorkina, the one with the glare of an ice queen, was elegant and near perfect. She cast fetching glances at the judges as if to say, "I dare you to score me lower."

"Hocus-pocus," Karolyi would call it. "I was afraid she would be scored higher because of her reputation."

Khorkina believed coming in that the all-around title was hers to lose. And really, she did nothing to lose it.

But there was Patterson, daring the judges with ungodly, unseen skills first on the bars, then the ever-important balance beam and finally the floor.

"Of course I watched Khorkina's scores," said Patterson's coach, Yvegny Marchenko. "I wondered if they would score her higher, because she is Khorkina."

Khorkina was the Ice Princess who never would lose this kind of competition against a bunch of upstarts, especially an upstart American.

With that Uma Thurman look, Khorkina melted hearts. With that cold, concentrated stare, she showed the focus of one of gymnastics' all-time greats.

As much as American pixies and power packs have chased the most prestigious Olympic title in women's sports for 20 years, there always has proved to be a Russian or a Romanian who was just slightly better.

The biggest reason the Eastern European domination could not be broken: No U.S. hopeful managed to fulfill the demands of one thing. The balance beam.

"That damn beam," Karolyi said, shaking his head at all the remarkable athletes who have tried to duplicate Retton's 1984 accomplishment, but failed. "That beam. That was the problem."

Kim Zmeskal, the heir apparent to Retton's greatness in 1992, fell off the beam in the preliminaries in Barcelona.

Shannon Miller, perhaps the smoothest, most elegant U.S. gymnast ever, wobbled ever so slightly in 1996, missing a chance on individual all-around gold.

One night earlier, Hamm proved how possible comebacks on this stage can be. Here, Patterson proved how beautiful.

After a solid parallel bars routine, Patterson was back on track but only losing ground to Khorkina, whose 9.725 on the bars trumped Patterson's 9.575.

When Patterson stepped to the beam, Khorkina must have thought the gold was hers. Patterson came to the Games with the most difficult beam routine in the world, but rarely had she executed it without a big flaw. At the Olympic trials, Patterson twice fell off the beam, rendering her in many opinions the third-best U.S. hope.

Suddenly, here was the only American hope and a distant one at that. Balancing. Beaming.

"I was feeling a little bit of pressure and a little nervous," Patterson said. "I knew if I didn't hit that, I wouldn't have a chance."

She hit it, flawlessly. All three tumbling runs on the beam were nothing but pluck and stuck. The dismount and landing were precision.

And then she floated through the air, overwhelmed and overjoyed, just the way America likes its darlings, toward the floor.

Khorkina hit a fluid, but unspectacular floor routine, and Patterson stepped up as the final performer of the evening.

"It was her gold medal already," Karolyi said. "She never misses on the floor. It was like she already was wearing the crown and was just showing off ... It felt like Mary Lou again. It felt like 20 years ago."

It felt like the most amazing of Olympic moments. Unrehearsed. And unreal.